No matter what the occasion is, our go-to gift for friends, family, teachers, or co-workers is something that we’ve baked. Pies, cookies, cakes, nothing says “I love you”, “feel better”, “you’re doing great”, or “thinking of you” quite like love in the form of food. If you too look for any excuse to fire up your oven, science tells us it’s about a lot more than just supplying those you love with sweets, in fact, there are a lot of psychological benefits. Let’s take a look at them! (Go ahead and get the oven pre-heating and that Pinterest recipe you’ve been dying to try queued up, you know you want to!)
Keep Your Focus
Baking is a great way to make the rest of the world go away and sometimes that’s all we need. It requires you to focus on directions that have to be followed in a certain order, and before you know it, all you care about is how perfectly you’ve rolled your log of cookie dough for the freezer, and not whatever you were stressing about just minutes ago.
Express Yourself
You don’t need us to tell you how important creative expression is for our overall well-being, but what you may not have considered is that baking is a form of self-expression, just like music or painting. Baking is just more delicious. And it smells better.
Think Happy Thoughts
We’re about to get really deep here, but believe it or not, baking gives your life meaning and establishes connections with other people. It allows you to visualize a happy moment in the future, like when your friends or family bite into those New York Cheesecake copycat Crumbl cookies for the first time, so when you bake, you also feel like you’re contributing something good to the world. Because you are.
Don’t Be Cry, Have Some Pie
If you find that you’re the type of person that sometimes struggles with finding the right words at times, have you by chance noticed that you tend to bake for people during certain life events instead? This is totally normal. Psychologists will in fact refer to taking people food in times of grief or sorrow as a cultural norm because while it can be hard to find the right words, we can always just let the baked goods do the talking.
Common Ground
Sometimes we may not agree on a lot, but you know where most of us can find at least some common ground? That’s right, among food. So not only can food serve as an expression of love, but it’s something we can all relate to. It’s hard to have bad blood among a group of folks you’re sharing Tiramisu with.